Larry Zox Artist BiographyAmerican, 1937-2006

American painter, Larry Zox, is best known for his work in the colour field movement of the 1960s. His hard-edged abstract paintings were showcased in major museums, including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. His studio on 20th Street in New York was known in the 1970s as a gathering spot for an eclectic crowd of artists, boxers and bikers.

Born in Des Moines, Larry Zox studied at the University of Oklahoma, Drake University and then the Des Moines Art Center, where he trained under noted German artist George Grosz. Larry Zox was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a National Council of the Arts award and served as an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth, the University of North Carolina and Yale.

Larry Zox moved to New York in 1958 and became part of the downtown art scene. His earliest works, completed in 1959-62, were painted collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto joined sheets of plywood. Afterwards, he made pictures similar in appearance to the collages, but entirely painted and with straight as well as ragged edges.

Larry Zox began his Rotation series in 1963 to use a standardised geometrical compositional schema as the basis for a series of paintings each different in colour and by the mid 1960s, his large geometric paintings were appearing at prestigious galleries.

By 2005, when he had his first New York solo show in more than two decades, his style had mellowed from the hard-edged geometry of the 1960s and 1970s. His lines had become more fluid and his surfaces more painterly, but his concern with color and shape remained unabated.